The automotive market offers sizeable opportunities for thermoformed parts, and by extension thermoform tooling, but only if processors and toolmakers embrace high-tech mold designs and forming techniques. […]
Mold designers and builders try to use the typical methods of minimizing wear—such as using differential metals; using low-wear coatings; specifying high metal hardness thus equating high hardness with low wear; designing shutoffs with high angles thus avoiding locking shutoff angles; and, many more concepts that their experience leads them to believe works best in [...]
The best solution to the problem of movement causing stress was very simple. If component A is forced against component B thus putting both components under stress, remove the stress. Removing the stress can be accomplished by a revolutionary principle and that is to incorporate designs that allow components to move in the mold.Specifically, if [...]
Design for manufacturability is not a new concept, nor is the use of digital solutions for the many steps in mold design. Yet it remains a daunting task to rapidly produce cost-effective manufacturing molds for complex organically-shaped products. […]
1. Intricate details involved in part manufacture. The amount of effort and engineering (mechanical, manufacturing, industrial, chemical, metallurgy/materials, polymer, fluid dynamics, thermodynamics, and even electrical)—regardless of required part tolerance—that goes into each and every mold to produce a quality, aesthetically pleasing, flash-free injection molded component. […]
The word automation means different things to different people, but when related to CAD/CAM there is a more common view. It means reducing menu clicks for frequent tasks. In a production environment, a frequent task could be something as simple as programming a certain type of groove on a turned profile. Saving these menu selections [...]
Medical parts have different requirements than other molded articles, and as a result tooling engineers over the years have pioneered new mold materials, coatings and mold maintenance practices. […]
A review of machining options for tapered rib processing, typically found in plastic injection and die cast molds. Applications involving tapered ribs are usually associated with plastic injection and die cast molds. For many years the process used for creating tapered ribs was EDM; however, utilizing programming processes that incorporate high-speed machining (HSM) principles can [...]
Today’s mold manufacturer is often looking for time and cost savings on many levels. There are solutions—whether it is to reduce development times, accelerate the configuration of entire initial sample test reports or shorten reaction times for damage analyses. […]
Many CAM software products produce toolpath process data and write neutral-formatted output files, like APT CL data. An external postprocessor program then translates the neutral data to a specific machine tool focusing on machine tool kinematics and controller syntax information. This traditional process has certainly been successfully applied. […]